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Title: Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Institutional Structures of Feeling) by Marta E. Savigliano ISBN: 0813316383 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: January, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $36.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3
Rating: 1
Summary: Tanog dancers beware!
Comment: This book is basically unreadable. I tried several times to wade through it and eventually gave up. I am sure there are some valuable points here but they are under deep layers of academic self indulgence. Tango dancers beware! This book is more about political theory than the dance.
Rating: 5
Summary: History of Tango Including Social and Emotional Aspects
Comment:
Histories of the Argentine tango are often polemical. Questions of propriety, national identity and social position have colored and distorted the perceptions of both authors and readers. In this tradition, Marta E. Savigliano, Assistant Professor of dance history at the University of California, Riverside, explores the history of the Argentine Tango as a dance form using sex/gender, wealth/class and color/race categories.
As a woman, a feminist and a dancer of tango, Savigliano is willing to investigate aspects of the tango that both attract and disturb many people. What is different and most provocative in Savigliano's history of the tango is her exploration of the sex-gender dynamics. Her description of tango includes its emotional context:
"As a powerful representation of male/female courtship, stressing the tension involved in the process of seduction, the tango performance has gone through several successive adjustments as it has been adopted and legitimized by the upper classes and by Western hegemonic cultures."
Savigliano's legitimization road introduces us to upper-crust Argentine lads slumming in the brothels of Buenos Aires, takes us through left-bank Paris of the 1910s, explains romantic reinterpretations of tango as it became THE dance of the Argentine middle class by the 1940s. We even visit more recent Japanese tango revivals.
Is the tango a display of unequal male-female power relationships? Who seduces whom?
Savigliano speaks as someone who knows well the tango, notably the heart and soul and the passion-tension in the dance. She views the tango woman not as a victim, but as a co-conspirator. The follower may not lead the tango, but she often knows more about what's happening than the leader:
"Translated into tango choreographic terms, [Tango] lyrics suggest that milonguitas could provoke the dance (call the attention of their target through their glances, figure, and dancing abilities) and tempt the class/race status quo into motion, but they would never lead or "mark" (marcar) in the moment at which the special steps were performed.
So Savigliano's answer is that the follower provokes and teases, and maybe controls the leader's heart and intentions, even while the leader is choreographing the dance, in spite of the fact that the economic power relationship may be quite unequal.
There are not many English language histories of the tango, so Savigliano's effort is a welcome contribution. On the whole, the writing style is accessible for an intelligent reader, although sometimes the academic approach is over-stressed and other times it is too artistic or impressionable.
The strength of this book is that human emotions and the male-female dynamic of tango have been brought into its historical analysis. The tango dance is quite unusual in this regard because without the experience of dancing tango an armchair historian simply persuing primary-source material would miss some of the most important elements no matter how deep the investigation.
Tom Stermitz
Chautauqua Publishing
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Title: Paper Tangos (Public Planet Books) by Julie Taylor ISBN: 0822321912 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Tao of Tango by Johanna Siegmann ISBN: 155212410X Publisher: Trafford Publishing Pub. Date: 19 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Samba: Resistance in Motion (Arts and Politics of the Everyday) by Barbara Browning ISBN: 0253209560 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Tango!: The Dance, the Song, the Story by Simon Collier, Artemis Cooper, Maria Susana Azzi, Richard Martin, Ken Haas ISBN: 0500279799 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Tango : The Structure of the Dance level 1/ Multimedia Extended Version by Mauricio Castro ISBN: 9874328118 Publisher: Tango Discovery Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.90 |
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